Melissa Rosenberg Quotes

Sympathetic characters usually have a voice. They usually don't have any trouble being heard.

You can't make the audience fall in love with a character you don't like.

Audiences need to engage with characters.

You have to present characters an audience can relate to.

One of the things that separates a good genre movie from a bad genre movie, I always think, ironically, is when you care about the people. The dime a dozen ones are where you don't have any awareness of the character.

I usually don't find myself reacting to my characters. I just create them ... And let the audience decide whether they're empathetic or scared or compelled to cheer me on.

Supporting characters add depth to a story, and great actors leave their imprint with the audience.

When you're building a character, or at least when I'm building a character, you start saying, 'How am I going to make people like him?'

You need the audience to become invested in the characters and in order to become invested, they need to identify with the characters... and that's why the characters need to be real.

My characters are always utterly sympathetic to me, if that makes any sense.

I'm interested in characters and relationships.

All my characters have been relatable.

I don't ever really know where I get my characters from.

If we get caught up in a story, it's because we've started to care about the characters, and that can only happen if we've moved beneath the surface.

I mean, can I really create a full, three-dimensional character? I don't know anymore. I'm certainly going to try.

I always try to make my characters people, and yet I always want to entertain.

In most films - especially in regards to the protagonist - really from the get-go they set up some scenario that endears that character to the audience. Or imbues him with some nobility or heroism or something.

The thing with videogame characters is that they tend to be really undercooked, and people don't take the time to really flesh them out. They don't treat them with the respect that a writer writing characters in any other medium would treat their character.

When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.

To me, characters are at the heart of great literature.

What makes characters real are details, and if you're crafting a person from scratch, you're probably not going to pay as much attention to a question like, 'Does this person bite their nails?'

Plot and character are virtually the same thing.

Once you've established where you are, you go to the character and elaborate on expressions and action.

You decide which characters you want and then do the best you can to bring their humanity to the forefront in the context that you place them in - the crises in which you've placed them.

With every episodic, there's a learning curve where writers try to find the voice of the characters by way of the actors. Many details are found along the way. On 'Caprica,' although the franchise already existed, we were creating an entirely new world full of new characters.